If you are not aware of how those changes affect your security posture, you are not as secure as your documentation suggests. You may not even be compliant.
Nowhere is that lack of awareness more worrying than in one of your most exposed assets: your web apps.
Much like the front door of an office building, your web app sees the most traffic in your network. It’s there on web stores as the face of your business. It’s on your client’s phones as the main artery of traffic, driving your business.
And, most importantly, it’s where much of your most sensitive data is.
This is true whether the traffic is from legitimate clients or malicious actors.
So when the constantly shifting landscape inevitably creates a gap in the security of your web application, you want to know about it as soon as possible.
Otherwise, you run the risk of finding it only after an attacker has. This vigilance requires more than compliance-focused, checklist security.
For many industries, a yearly penetration test is the cost of compliance. In between those mandated penetration tests, organizations often rely on automated security scans to ensure they maintain their security posture.
However, while scans may be useful in some contexts, their limits constrain their ability to reveal what’s really happening with your security. This can give organizations an incomplete, or even misleading, understanding of their security.
Example
Consider an organization that owns an online gambling app. They run a vulnerability scan that flags a low-severity information disclosure issue: the internal game server IP addresses are exposed. On its face, this doesn’t represent a danger, so the gap is ignored.
But when a malicious actor finds the addresses, they use the vulnerability as a foothold. After some reconnaissance, they find the system lacks both rate limiting on game join requests and bot detection.
The attacker chains these vulnerabilities together to get four bots into the same poker game. So now, instead of a game of skill between five opponents, the lone human in the game is playing against four colluding bots.
As a result, human players lose, funnelling money to the attacker.
If news of this gets out to the users, it could be catastrophic for the organization that owns the app. After all, no one wants to play a rigged game, especially with money on the line.
This scan didn’t fail because it didn’t find the security gap. It, like many scans, failed because it didn’t address some of the most important aspects of security, chief among them: business impact.
A gap in security is only as important as the potential impact it can have on business outcomes. To truly understand whether your applications are secure or not, the tester has to understand your business priorities. This allows them to see where a malicious actor may attack to gain the most leverage over your organization.
With that in mind, they can better understand what your security should look like and where failures can be catastrophic.
Attackers can be very creative when probing to find vulnerabilities and abusing the vulnerabilities they find to get closer to the data that gives them leverage. A penetration tester will take the time not only to understand your business drivers, but also how malicious actors think and act. So, when they find vulnerabilities, they are able to probe deeper and leverage them to see how each vulnerability has the potential to impact your customers and your business.
Security is more than load-balancers, web application firewalls, cryptography, anti-virus or any other tools designed to keep your applications secure. It’s a complex system of technologies, processes, business practices and humans that need to be taught and calibrated to work together.
So while a scan may tell you that you have the necessary tools in place to capture telemetry, it won’t reveal whether there’s anyone there to process it, whether that person understands what they are seeing or whether there’s an incident response plan to guide your team when suspicious activity is identified.
That requires a deeper, more comprehensive approach, one that goes beyond automated scans to include a full application security testing program
Application security testing isn’t a single scan or test. It’s a layered approach in which each test catches different types of vulnerabilities. Together, these layers give you a far more complete picture of your risk than any one method alone.
While each of these is valuable on its own, they all have blind spots. Automated scans can’t chain vulnerabilities together, understand your business logic, or think creatively the way a real attacker would. That’s where penetration testing comes in.
A skilled penetration tester takes the findings from each of these tests as a starting point, then goes further, stitching them together, manually probing your application, testing business logic, and simulating real-world attack scenarios to show you how an actual breach would affect your application and your business.
This is how organizations can get the clearest picture of their real-world risk.
Static application security testing (SAST) and dynamic application security testing (DAST) operate at different stages and provide different insights.
Organizations run SAST tests early in the development cycle to analyze an application’s source code before it runs. This allows them to identify vulnerabilities like insecure coding practices, hardcoded secrets, or injection vulnerabilities before the product is shipped.
In contrast, organizations run DAST tests on live, running applications. Instead of testing the code internally (like SAST), DAST tests are run from the outside, simulating how malicious actors would attack the application. This uncovers issues like authentication flaws, misconfigurations, and other runtime vulnerabilities.
Both SAST and DAST are often automated and scoped to specific findings. This makes them easier and cheaper to run than the more comprehensive penetration testing.
At the end of a penetration test, you get a prioritized breakdown of your risks, ranked by the potential impact to your business and the ease with which each risk can be mitigated.
Then, the penetration testers will sit down with your team, walking them through exactly how each vulnerability could be exploited and how it could be prevented. Your team walks away with a clear roadmap of what to fix first and why, along with guidance to help your developers prevent the introduction of a similar vulnerability in the future.
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According to IBM, the average monetary cost of a data breach is $4.4M USD. Depending on application complexity, a penetration test costs between $10,000 and $100,000 USD.
Roughly speaking, if quarterly penetration tests (priced out at the high end) save your organization from one breach in a decade, you’ve still come out ahead financially, even without factoring in the reputational cost of a breach.
But, if you factor in the reputational impact, the impact of a data breach has the potential to cost much more than today’s average.
Of course, no security measure eliminates risk entirely, but regular testing significantly reduces your exposure to risks that threaten your revenue stream and your reputation.
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Continuous penetration testing allows you to be confident in the security of your critical business applications. Not only do you always know where the security gaps are as your applications change and evolve, but you also understand what risks are tied to each issue.
This knowledge allows you to make the right choices for your organization at the right time.
At iON, we provide a full suite of application security solutions, from automated scanning to expert-led penetration testing. But we don’t stop at finding vulnerabilities. If testing reveals gaps, we work with you to close them: reconfiguring existing tools, refining processes, and helping your team build the skills and response plans to stay ahead of the next threat. Schedule a call with our team about penetration testing today to protect your organization in the future.